Winds of Peace Foundation: Grants for Global Development

OVERVIEW: Winds of Peace makes grants to close the social and economic gaps in vulnerable Nicaraguan populations.

IP TAKE: Although Winds of Peace does not accept unsolicited LOIs, it seems to favor a few groups with multi-year grants, leaving plenty of room for new grantees. Grantmaking is competitive and frequently focused on Nicaragua. This is not an accessible funder, but they are highly cooperative, working closely with grantees to advance their mission.

To stand out and be noticed here, your work needs to be sustainable and benefit vulnerable populations. Accountability and self-directed community-based work built into programs and projects are a must.

PROFILE: When Harold and Louise Nielsen began visiting Central America in the late 1970s, they recognized the enormous economic and social disparities among its people. To address these disparities, the Nielsen's established the Winds of Peace Foundation. Since 1978, the foundation seeks to "[a]ddress global problems of poverty, injustice and lack of opportunity, particularly as they exist in Nicaragua" with a particular emphasis on "[w]omen, Indigenous people and the rural poor."

Grants for Global Development and Sustainable Agriculture

The foundation makes grants through five programmatic areas: Rural Credit, Education, Worker Owned Enterprises, Community Social Enterprises, and Accompaniment.

Rural Credit grants invest in providing small farmer access to credit from the formal banking system or to microcredit in the absence of formal banking. In the past, Winds of Peace worked with NITLAPAN, a research and development institute at the Central American University in Managua, which founded the Local Development Fund, providing access to credit to the small scale farmers. WPF has given to the fund since the 1990s.

WPF focuses most of its lending on “grassroots cooperatives, particularly 1st tier cooperatives, both locally owned savings and loan cooperatives (like Hand in Hand Bank rural bank run by women in Waslala)  and coffee cooperatives involved in fair trade and organic production.” WPF continues to make research-based grants to further “refine its loan practices to ensure that their impact advances the expansion of human capabilities of the local peasant organizations, especially women in the countryside.” While WPF’s grants do not directly fund innovations in farming, but rather the local farmers tasked with growing, it appears to fund organizations that support both sustainable farming practices and micro-lending to rural farmers.


Education grants related to global development largely occur through the Nielsen Educational Fund, which honors the memory of Louise Nielsen. WPF’s education initiative works to create and fund research, “development and implementation initiative, … [to] contribute to the transformation of Nicaraguan education by increasing practical access to and quality of education, and utilizing development of Nicaraguan ideas, programs, educators and strategies toward those ends.” This fund offers funding for “scholarships, education research, collaboration with Nicaraguan entities engaged in education development, creation of seminars or workshops, teacher training or other related activities.”

Worker Owned Enterprises grants work to study the “organizational dynamics of grassroots cooperatives” with micro-lending.

The Community Social Enterprises initiative works to help “cooperatives in their attempts to bring about needed changes” and to study and explore other forms of community organizations which do involve local initiative and investment – community social enterprises and traditional forms of community collaboration, like sharecropping and “mano vuelta” [shared labor].

The WPF’s Accompaniment initiative supports tlocal populations’ ability to “reflect on and resolve their own problems.”

Important Grant Details:

Winds of Peace grants are relatively modest, generally ranging from $5,000 to $25,000. In addition to grants, Winds of Peace makes program-related investments that typically range from $5,000 to $50,000.  While the foundation maintains a website, this is a relatively low profile funder with a paid staff of just two. The Winds of Peace Foundation does not accept unsolicited requests for funding or grant applications.  

PEOPLE:

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